


Closer

by Pixiigh



Series: Tweek and Craig's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse [2]
Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26514781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixiigh/pseuds/Pixiigh
Summary: Craig lost Tweek at the end of the world, and neither are dealing with it like reasonable adults.
Relationships: Craig Tucker/Tweek Tweak
Series: Tweek and Craig's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823542
Comments: 19
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

“McCormick! On your left!”

Craig watches Kenny dive out of the way of an approaching zombie, his body skidding on the pavement underneath him and scrambling up to run in the opposite direction, towards Stan and Craig. The zombie shambles towards Kenny, too close for comfort, an eye missing and hair pulled out in chunks.

“Did you get it?” Stan asks when Kenny joins them as the trio duck behind an overturned car. Craig peeks his head out, aims Bebe’s gun, and shoots the zombie square in its left eye. It goes down with a thump, gurgling disgustingly as it does.

They’re silent for a moment to ensure nothing is coming after their gunshot, the three of them too scared to move just in case. When Stan lets out a breath, Kenny produces a fresh, unopened first aid kit from his jacket. 

“It has the tablets?” Stan is sweating as he eyes the kit, licking his lips nervously. “Tell me it has the tablets.”

“It has the tablets,” Kenny says soothingly, popping the kit open to reveal the sugar tablets he was sent to retrieve for Kyle. 

Kyle luckily had enough medical supplies for his diabetes to last them this long, but they ran out a week ago. Stan has been panicked ever since, nearly killing Kenny when he suggested the use of some near-expired insulin, despite not knowing a thing about the person it was originally prescribed to, that he found in the cupboards of an abandoned house. Kyle used it anyway, since it was still good for another week, but it gave Stan such anxiety that no one could even be in the same room as him that entire night. Kyle  _ tried  _ to explain that some insulin was better than nothing, but even he couldn’t be around Stan anymore.

Unfortunately for Kyle, the suburb they’re holed up in doesn’t have much in the way of medicine. Most people seemed to have had the sense to take it with them. They’ve been in as many houses as they can, scavenging as much as possible to make sure Kyle stays safe, but the options are slim.

Craig doesn’t like to think about it, but they have to move on, or Kyle might die. Maybe. Craig’s got no idea how diabetes works. Honestly, Craig thinks Stan might die of a worry-induced heart attack before Kyle dies of anything diabetes related.

It’s been weeks since he’s seen Tweek, since the hardware store. 

It had happened so fast; they had been heading back to Token’s car one moment and when Craig looked back to make sure Tweek hadn’t wandered off, he was gone. Bebe and Wendy found the four of them panicking, looking everywhere and yelling for their friend recklessly. 

There wasn’t even a trace of Tweek anywhere, so they elected to stay in Colorado Springs just in case. But it was becoming clear to all of them that they couldn’t stay. They would have to move soon. 

Not only were their main supplies running low, there was nothing left in Colorado Springs except the massive horde of undead trapped in the grocery store. Craig’s stomach lurches everytime he thinks of Ike running back to them, zig zagging through alleys and streets to try to throw the zombies off his tail. They’ve now spent two weeks hiding from them, but they pop up everywhere.

At least it explains why there aren’t any living people in the abandoned town. They’re all un-living.

Kenny leads Craig and Stan back to the house where the rest of the group is sheltered. This particular one is in a much better state of repair than a lot of others they’ve seen; there are better ones, but they have alarms that would trip as soon as they tried to get in. They’ve learned that lesson the hard way. They stay mostly on the main floor, congregate and camp out in the living room when they aren’t snooping around outside. There are two bedrooms upstairs, but one of them smells like death and the other has blood stains on the carpet, so they avoid that area as much as they can. They block the back door with the fridge that Kenny and Stan pulled out from the wall, and all the windows except the one in the front are mostly blacked out.

The walk back to their temporary home is quiet. 

Token’s been keeping watch for them, hidden behind a bench on the porch set up so he can look through the rungs on the fencing. He stands up when he sees them, and the four of them silently make their way into the house. Bebe’s car is missing when they get there.

They hadn’t gone far today, and so they enter the house with mostly empty hands aside from the first aid kit, some dubious beef jerky Stan found in a car on the side of the road, and a bag of vegetables they raided from someone’s garden. 

It’s not enough, but they’ll make do. At least Kyle can get his sugar tablets.

And Kyle is grateful; he doesn’t look good as he pops the top and immediately shoves two in his mouth at once. He’s pale and sweating and his eyes are unfocused. 

“Thanks,” he says gratefully. “Don’t suppose there’s any Tylenol or anything in that kit, is there? I’ve got a bit of a migraine from the low sugar…”

Kenny pulls out the small tube of pills, popping two out for Kyle and passing him a half full water bottle. Kyle is, yet again, thankful.

They stew in silence for a while, before Token brings up the inevitable.

“So… where to next?” he asks nervously. “I’ve been scouting out a few locations, listening to the radio, but it seems like we’re in for a long trip no matter where we decide to go.”

Craig purses his lips. He’s been arguing against leaving for the past month now, despite not seeing any signs of Tweek no matter how hard he looks. He can’t just give up.If they do leave, and Tweek somehow finds his way back, how are they supposed to find him if they’re in another city, another state? 

Craig tries hard not to think about that.

“What about Canada?” Ike bites his lip as all eyes focus on him. “I know, I know, don’t give me those looks. But remember World War Z? How one of the last safe spots was Nova Scotia?”

“This isn’t World War Z, Ike.” Kenny’s voice is gentle, but Craig can hear the chiding tone behind it. “Canada is too far. It’s at least two weeks away, with the route we would have to take, and that’s not counting all the times we would have to stop. We’d probably run out of gas.”

“You don’t know that.” Ike sounds unsure, though, and he wavers for a moment. “We could find cars with gas in them, I’m sure they’re everywhere.”

Craig knows it only takes a few months for gas to go bad. He doesn’t know how long things have been this way in this part of the state; for all they know, the gas they do have left could have already gone bad. But he doesn’t say anything. Ike seems so hopeful, Craig can’t ruin it even if it is for the best. 

He only half listens to the group as they argue about what to do next. No one mentions Tweek. It’s like they all just… forgot about him. He wishes Wendy and Bebe were there. They would never forget. 

“We have to find Tweek.” He finally speaks up. The room goes quiet, and a sort of nervous air hangs stale around them. “We’re not going anywhere until we have Tweek with us.”

He had at least been expecting Kenny to agree with him, at the very least, but the agreement doesn’t come. No one says anything for a moment.

“Y-yeah,” Clyde agrees eventually, but he sounds uneasy and unsure. “Of course, buddy.”

Craig says nothing. Clyde’s tone said everything it needed to.

But Craig knows he won’t be going with them if Tweek isn’t coming too. 

Tweek  _ will _ come back to him, he vows, as the conversation around him drifts away again. He just has to.

*~*

They decide to try Denver.

It had apparently been an idea forming in the back of Token’s brain for a while. He had been in contact with someone in Denver for a few weeks now, and they’ve told him about a sort of colony they have set up.

“This sounds like some Walking Dead bullshit,” Craig grumbles. “Colony after fucking colony, something always went wrong for them. How do you know it’s not some ruse? Fucking cannibals or something?”

“It’s not,” Token urges. “Trust me. They have room for all of us. Obviously things won’t be back to normal, but we would at least be safe and have food.”

“And what about Tweek?”

The room, predictably, goes silent. Everyone looks nervous. Kenny sighs.

“Craig, dude, you might have to let this one go. I… I know you want him to, and I know you want to hope he will, but I don’t think Tweek will come back.”

Craig hardly realizes that he’s standing until his fist hits the table below him. “Shut the fuck up, McCormick.”

“He’s right,” Bebe says, not meeting Craig’s eye and sounding miserable. “I think it’s time we consider the possibility that Tweek is-”

“Shut UP.”

“No, Craig, you shut up!” Bebe raises her voice, stands up too. “We can’t stay here! We have to go! How are we supposed to find Tweek if we starve to death? Or the house gets overrun? We don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know how long we can stay here, so we need to leave before it’s too late. If we go to Denver, we can find someone who knows what they’re doing to look for Tweek.”

Craig is seeing red when he starts to reply, but is cut off.

“You don’t have to fucking come with us if you don’t want to. If you want to stay and fucking die, dude, fine with me. But we’re all leaving.”

His eyes almost pop out of his head as he stares at Bebe. He can hardly believe what he’s hearing.

He thought Bebe was on his side. He thought that Bebe would always stick up for Tweek, wanted to help bring him back. But he knows now, with just one outburst, how wrong he was.

How long was she thinking of abandoning Tweek? She, better than most,  _ knows _ that Tweek would come back to them. She knows that, and Craig is positive. But she’s being selfish.

Should he be selfish? Should he go with him? To go with them would be leaving Tweek, though, and he could never do that.

_ But Tweek left you. _

No. He wants to shake his head to clear the thoughts, but decides against it so no one thinks he’s losing it. 

Tweek did what he thought he had to do back then, he reminds himself. He never really left. He tries to tell himself they’re not living under the fucking Code of Hammurabi, nothing is going to feel better if he doesn’t wait for Tweek to come back. In fact, it might feel worse.

He owes it to Tweek to find out what happened. He owes it to himself to ride out the end of the world with the person he loves.

Loves.

He never got to tell Tweek. He knows Tweek knows, but the pain in his chest at not saying it before it was too late gets so bad sometimes. 

His thoughts are a mess. What is he even supposed to be thinking about right now? He speaks without considering it.

“Fine, yeah. Fine. I’m better off without you assholes anyway.”

And he stalks off, throwing the door open and wandering out.

*~*

Aside from waking up with a massive headache and a huge bruise on his arm, Tweek’s been fine for the past few weeks. He just doesn’t know where he is, or who he’s with.

They wear masks. Bane masks. The masks look familiar, but he’s not sure why. Their voices are distorted and sound strange and Tweek wants to laugh, but whoever is wearing them smacked him over the head and knocked him out for longer than medically safe, so he just rolls his eyes when he hears them speak.

They’re in an apartment, he’s gathered that much. He’s not great at depth perception, but it’s definitely too high to jump out, and the front door is barred so he can’t sneak out. 

Whoever these two are, they’re not well prepared and both seem afraid of everything. The blonde one jumps at every noise, and the brunette is prone to taking fits of hyperventilation in the corner, muttering absolute nonsense that Tweek can never make out. They have a small food supply, but no batteries or matches, so they spend their nights sitting in darkness.

By the second week, Tweek is sure it’s a cult. 

He tries to talk to them, but they just stare blankly at him with those stupid Bane masks and don’t say anything of any value. They remind him of the NPC’s in the video games Craig and Clyde would play while Tweek tried to do homework. 

They seem to be waiting for something, but whatever it is hasn’t come yet. Tweek’s tried to keep himself entertained, but he’s read all the books left by the previous owners of the apartment, and the two idiots he’s with won’t play Monopoly with him.

By the third week, Tweek’s anxiety has clawed its way back up, and it takes every ounce of concentration not to dissolve into a crying mess like the brunette man every day. He’s better than that, he tells himself. He can’t cry in front of them.

But the thoughts never end. 

What if he was taken to be a sacrifice for the zombies? What if these people are psyching themselves up to eat him? What if they’re just going to kill him for sport at the first sign of weakness?

By the fourth week, Tweek has mostly given up hope. 

He had been thinking about Craig, about Stan and Kyle, Wendy and Bebe, Kenny… and then he just stops. He knows that if they were looking for him, Kenny would have found him by now. Kenny always finds a solution. 

Every time he thinks about Craig, he thinks about how he slipped his hand out of his grip to investigate a noise he heard behind them as they made their way to Token’s car. Craig had hardly noticed Tweek letting go of his hand, and when he did, it was too late. 

Tweek doesn’t know how these two bozos got him away from his friends without attracting attention, but they did it somehow. 

In the hardest moments, he wonders if they even realized he was missing at all.

Tweek has lost count of the days. He tries his best not to think about anything anymore. He stops eating, which apparently concerns one of his kidnappers.

It’s the blonde, and he’s waving half of a dried apple under Tweek’s nose. Tweek shakes his head, curls up and hugs his knees to his chest. The blonde shoves the apple closer to Tweek. He can smell the mould growing on it. He frowns.

“I don’t want it,” he tells the man, tucking his nose into his knees so he doesn’t have to be surrounded by the mould. The man taps his leg. “I said I don’t want it!”

The man huffs in exasperation at Tweek’s show of defiance. “You need to eat, Tweek.”

Tweek pauses. His heart stops, he can feel it in his throat.

He never told this man his name.

The blonde seems to realize this at the same time as Tweek, and he can hear the gasp behind the mask. He scrambles up onto his feet quickly, upsetting the mask just enough so Tweek can see his face.

Which explains why the man knows his name. 

“You fucker!” Tweek screams, getting up as well, his hands sliding up the wall frantically as he goes. “You mother _ fucker!” _

He can feel the heat rising in his face and he knows he probably looks like an absolute maniac, but he doesn’t care. He balls his fists up tightly, like he’s getting ready to take a swing. Now that he knows who stands in front of him, he’s confident he could land a hit if he tried.

“Tweek, i-it’s okay!” the other man insists. “It’s okay! We’re not going to hurt you!”

“I’ll fucking hurt you if you don’t explain what’s going on!” Tweek replies, his voice higher and more shrill than he wanted. “Jesus Christ, dude! You could have killed me!”

The mask comes off all the way, revealing the bashful face of Butters Stotch. He can't quite meet Tweek's eye and he's rubbing his top lip against his bottom lip nervously, sweat pooling on his forehead like it's some kind of inquisition.

“I-I have a perfectly good explanation, Tweek, honest!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M BEEEAAAACKKKKKKKKKK


	2. Chapter 2

“So Cartman is dead?”

Tweek knows this should be good news, but he can’t bring himself to be happy about it. He doesn’t know if it’s the pathetic look on Butters’ face as he tells Tweek about what happened, or if it’s the memory that Eric Cartman was, long ago, Tweek’s friend. Obviously never his best friend, but Tweek and Eric had fun together. 

Well, they had fun together when Eric wasn’t consumed with calling Tweek a spaz or a fag or whatever else he called him over the years, or trying to take over the world, or trying to con people out of large sums of money...

But somewhere along the line, recent events aside, something changed in Cartman. Tweek had noticed it before they even graduated high school. Something evil began to brew under Cartman’s skin, and nothing he’s done recently has really been much of a surprise.

So, he knows he should be happy Eric is dead, but he’s just not sure if he can muster it.

“Y-yeah,” Butters affirms. He made Scott take off his Bane mask after Tweek discovered it was him. Scott doesn’t seem to be affected so much by this news as he is by the confinement, but he still wears the same hollow look as Butters.

“How do you know?”

Butters has to take a deep breath. “After he found out that you guys got out of jail he really lost it. He was so mad, me and Scott ran and hid so he wouldn’t find us and try to blame us. I think he tried to find out, but no one knew where you were. Then when he found out that you were gone from South Park completely, he really  _ really _ lost it.”

“Is that when he went after Tricia?”

“Yeah, shortly after. Man, I’ve never seen him hate anyone that much, not even Kyle. He kept calling it civil war. He already had all those zombies cooped up, and he somehow trained them to be like, soldiers or something. He got  _ really _ into it and was kind of holding everyone hostage. Telling people when they could get food, how much they could have, where they could go. Anyone who didn’t listen got shot and turned into one of those things. But Tricia… she wouldn’t let him, she just did what she wanted, and she shot some of his army, and he hated it. So he decided he had to kill her.”

“What?!” Tweek shrieks. “Please tell me she’s alive, tell me she’s okay!”

His heart is pounding at the thought of Tricia being dead. He had last heard that she was okay, and had assumed she would continue to be, but he knew better than to trust Cartman. Butters doesn’t reply right away, which only makes things worse.

“I-I think so,” he says eventually. “Me and Scott left to try to find you guys before we found out what happened. Eric told us to, and he told us to wait for him but… it’s been weeks, we haven’t seen or heard from him.”

“How did you know where to find us?”

Butters looks bashful, embarrassed. “Well… uh… Kenny told me.”

“ _ Kenny?” _ Tweek is floored. Kenny… Kenny couldn’t have told Butters. Not after everything that they knew about Cartman and Scott and Butters. There has to be a mistake, Butters must be lying. Kenny would never do something like that. “What did Kenny tell you?”

“He told me you were heading to Colorado Springs, and that I could go with him if I wanted! But… I was too scared. I didn't want anyone to find out, and I knew you fellas' would be mad at me!”

Tweek tries to keep a straight face, he knows that Kenny revealing their location isn’t Butters’ fault, but he knows his facade is slipping. Every word from the other man's mouth just grates on Tweek so hard, he can't focus on anything else. Butters suddenly looks a little frightened.

“I wasn’t gonna tell Eric!” he says hastily. “Honest! I almost didn’t even tell Scott!”

Tweek pinches the bridge of his nose, tries to practice his measured breathing. “I swear to God, Butters, you’re so lucky Cartman is dead or I would fucking  _ kill you.” _

Butters makes a pathetic squeaking noise in fear. Without Cartman around, Butters is a real pussy. It would almost be funny if Tweek wasn’t so stressed out by the barrage of news.

“So, what do we do now?”

He asks his question to both Butters and Scott, evidently foolishly believing one of them had a plan. Clearly, he’s wrong, and his hope is misplaced. He feels embarrassed that these two absolute numbskulls could overpower him so easily and knock him out long enough to bring him somewhere.

He lets out a long breath. “I see you two were clearly counting on the whole ransoming me to Cartman thing for some reason, but you need to come up with something better now. We should go find Craig. Then they can decide what to do with you.”

Butters still looks terrified, but looking over at Scott, he just looks broken.

“We’re going to die,” he says, his voice hoarse. “We’re… we’re not gonna make it.”

Tweek shakes his head resolutely. “Shut the fuck up, Scott. Now, how do we get out of here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 
> 
> I think I realized that Butters my favourite character. I have so much in store for him.
> 
> **More things will be explained as they go, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Buckle up, buckaroos.***
> 
> Find me over on [Tumblr!](https://wonder-tweeks.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chapter 3

“On the road again…”

“Shut up, dude.”

“...just can’t wait to get on the road again…”

“I’m fucking serious, shut up.”

“...the life I love is making music with my friends…”

“Knock it off, man, I’m telling you.”

“...And I can't wait to get ON THE ROAD AGAIN.”

Craig resists the urge to bash his face off the window as Clyde sings, getting louder the more Craig protests. 

He has no idea why Clyde decided to follow him and sneak the keys to one of the cars they have left (and of course, it’s the sketchiest one that they could find, sitting empty in a driveway with the keys still in it and a full tank of gas) to go find Tweek, but Craig _had_ been grateful at one point. But now Clyde won’t stop singing as he drives, and Craig is finding that he’s losing patience. 

“I thought you were supposed to be looking out for Tweek, not lecturing me,” Clyde says as he turns onto a street just as empty as all the others. 

“You’re supposed to be looking out for zombies, not butchering Willie Nelson songs,” Craig shoots back, sticking his tongue out childishly. 

Clyde looks a little guilty, but says, “it’s not like they can hear me.”

“They’d hear you in Denver, dude, the way you were going.”

Clyde slows down the car, straining his eyes to see. He was supposed to get glasses, way back in high school, but never bothered to. Craig, on the other hand, with his perfect vision, sees a sight that makes his heart drop.

A lone zombie, in the middle of the road about a kilometer away from them, is eating something. Someone. Hunched over the remains of what was once a person. 

“Dude,” Clyde said, almost breathless, stopping the car but not turning it off. The zombie doesn’t stop its animalistic motions as it continues to tear apart the body. 

It’s not the first time Craig and Clyde have seen a sight like this, but the fact that the person getting torn open looks like they’ve hardly been dead for a day shocks Craig a little. Normally he sees them going for already rotting corpses, but something about the clothes this one is wearing and the fact that they still almost have a face left is jarring to him. 

Craig is able to keep it all in, but Clyde isn’t. Craig catches him balling his fist up and putting it to his mouth to keep him from too loud of a reaction.

“That’s someone’s daughter, dude,” he says, his voice shaky. “Maybe someone’s mom.”

“So is the zombie,” Craig points out, not entirely meaning it. It’s been a long time since he’s considered these things to be people, but they _were_ , at some point. It’s just a bit surreal to look at the jerky movements of a decayed man eating the corpse of a woman and trying to remember that the man was once a person. “Well… was, I guess.”

Clyde lets out a heavy breath. “What should we do?”

Craig hates that he’s usually the adult, the decision maker, anytime he goes out in the absence of Bebe or Kenny. Usually, one of those two take the role of leader, and are really good at it, but otherwise it falls to Craig. It’s not quite as annoying with Clyde, who Craig admits is a bit of an idiot, as it is with Stan or Kyle, but he still hates it.

What if he makes a bad decision? 

He tries not to think about it. “Let’s get out of here. This street’s a dead end, anyway.”

He scans the area one last time as Clyde puts the car in reverse and does a U-turn off the street as quickly as possible. The sight of the street is haunting - burnt shells of homes, some still smoking, line the cul-de-sac. He can tell they were once beautiful houses, now reduced to rubble.

“I wonder what happened,” he says aloud as Clyde gets back onto the main stretch connecting all the side streets in the residential area. “You think someone set a fire on purpose?”

Clyde is driving more carefully now, clearly spooked. “Does fire even kill them?”

“It…” Craig pauses. He doesn’t actually know. “It has to, right?”

“Yeah. It has to.”

Craig could tell Clyde wasn’t sure. But… it would just be too cruel for fate to allow these things to survive being burned by fire, and Craig just _has_ to keep telling himself that. 

Though, to be fair, the core concept of humans reanimating as undead zombie cannibals was pretty cruel in and of itself. He’s spent the last three months or so wondering how it could possibly get worse, but something always finds a way to do just that.

Clyde drives further and they fall silent, both looking hard for any sign of life, but not seeming to find any.

“It looks like no one has been here in ages,” Clyde remarks, rolling down his window and sticking his head out. “Oh God-” he mimes throwing up, “fuck, that’s… fuck…. disgusting.”

He’s right - the smell of decay and blood wafts into the car even as he quickly mashes the button to roll the window back up. Craig gags. 

“Everyone must have cleared out a while ago,” he says, pulling his shirt up over his face desperately in an attempt to keep down the granola bar he ate earlier. “God, fuck, it must have been absolute murder here before that though.”

They turn onto another street, a thoroughfare to the highway. Clyde hesitates. 

“Should we…?” he asks, his voice lilting up. “We still have half a tank of gas left… I’m sure we could find something.”

Craig chews his lip. The chances that Tweek is still here in Colorado Springs are low, he admits that now. But where could he have gone? Would he even have a way to get anywhere?

He decides quickly, without much thought. They’ve mostly been looking in residential areas, but not in the actual city, for fear of running into the hordes of zombies they’ve caught glimpses of. Even Kenny, as stupid and reckless and brave as he is, has avoided most of the city since they settled into the abandoned house.

“Let’s go into the city,” he replies, pulling out a map from the centre console. “There’s bound to be something there.”

Clyde, bless him, nods, and watches the route Craig draws with his finger.

Within minutes of their decision, they’re off.

*~*

It doesn’t take long for them to run into a massive hoard of zombies, but instead of running straight at the car like they normally would, it’s almost as if they’re tired, and barely give the vehicle a passing glance.

Craig squints out the window at them. “They look like they’re dying.”

“Dude, they’re already dead.”

“No, you dick, I mean like… they’re dying _more.”_

While Clyde is busy mapping out an escape route in case the hoard springs back to life suddenly, Craig watches them. They’re in a cluster, about fifty or sixty, just milling about and occasionally bumping into each other as they look about with empty eyes and mouths agape (the ones that still have their lower jaws, anyway). Some are missing limbs, and one only has about half a head attached to its neck. He can just barely hear a chorus of sickening groans through the glass, but he doesn’t want to open the window to make sure it’s just from them.

“They must have been like this for a while,” Clyde comments, finally becoming aware of their presence. “That’s truly disgusting. They look like someone dug up a bunch of graves but didn’t bother to, like, preserve them.”

As he said that, Craig watched the arm of one of the creatures on the edge of the crowd swing too far, and it falls off. The zombie doesn’t even notice, and continues trying to walk forward past the blockade of two other bodies. He wrinkles his nose.

“What are they standing in front of?” he asks, craning his neck. “It looks like they’re guarding something.”

Clyde ducks his head to see under Craig blocking his view. “I think it’s an apartment building.”

Or, what’s left of an apartment building. It looks like one of those stereotypical rich person apartments, with an awning and Craig imagines there was a doorman at one point. But now, the awning is ripped and one side is collapsed, and all the glass surrounding the lobby is smashed in. Some of the windows on the lower floors are in a similar state, and others further up are intact, but boarded up.

Craig points it out. “Maybe there’s still people in there.”

“Maybe they have food,” Clyde agrees hopefully. His stomach growls. “I… still can’t believe I forgot to bring food when I went to get you.”

Craig’s been trying to forget that it’s been a full day now since they’ve eaten, except for the granola bar he’d found stuffed in the pocket of his jeans. His stomach growls too. It’s been a while since they’ve gone without at least a little bit to eat. He’s grateful that there are a few bottles of water in the car, anyway, and tries to focus on that.

“Do you think we should go in?” he asks. “Drive around the back, let’s see if there’s a back door we can get in through or something.”

For a moment, he’s afraid that Clyde is going to tell him no and drive back to the group and tie him to a chair to keep him from trying to go find Tweek again, but he’s relieved when Clyde maneuvers around the crowd of zombies to the back of the building.

They don’t see it at first, but there is a door that looks promising. It’s heavy and metal and is totally intact, unlike the front door. And there aren’t any undead assholes back here to stop them. 

Clyde is able to get the car up tightly against the building, the passenger side right at the door. Craig gets out, and Clyde follows, and they leave Craig’s door propped open in case they need to make a quick getaway. They can both easily slide over the centre console to the drivers seat - if there are zombies outside, they won’t be getting an easy meal. 

The door is locked, but a quick minute with Craig’s trusty crowbar (which Craig is still kicking himself for not bringing himself - luckily, Clyde did) fixes that problem. It’s extremely loud as it creaks open, and the pair have to pause for a moment to make sure nothing heard, but quickly duck inside into the darkness, leaving the door propped open a sliver so they know where it is.

“Can you see anything?” Clyde whispers, right into Craig’s ear, his body pressed against Craig’s. He’s afraid, and it’s very obvious. “It’s fucking dark, dude.”

“Of course it’s dark, the power’s been off for months, probably.” Craig feels around for the wall, and once he finds it, he pulls Clyde over with him so they can at least feel for another door to take them out of whatever room they’ve found themselves in. The light from the outside does absolutely nothing to illuminate their way, so they’re forced to run their hands along the wall for something out of the ordinary.

It’s slow going, but they finally come across another door. It creaks open slightly as Craig’s hand runs across it and he freezes for a moment, before pressing his ear to the crack to see if he can hear anything.

Silence.

He peeks out next, and sees nothing. It’s still dark, but he can see more than he could in the first room. 

He pulls on Clyde’s hand, silently opening the door all the way for them to enter.

It appears that they’ve come upon the lobby, but not the part they saw from the street. To the left are elevators, all closed, and across from the last elevator is a door, likely the stairwell. Now that they can see again, he points at it, and Clyde nods. 

They leave the door open as they come through it, and around the corner, Craig can see the part of the lobby they saw, and the backs of the zombies they left on the street. They move silently to the stairwell door.

“Do you have anything to defend yourself with?” Craig asks, holding up his crowbar to demonstrate, but Clyde shakes his head. 

“I didn’t have enough time to grab anything else, just that.”

Craig swears under his breath. “Okay. Keep an eye out. I’ll go up first, just pull me if you see anything.”

He waits until Clyde nods, watching his Adam’s Apple bob as he swallows heavily, his eyes darting around in fear. Craig is actually a bit surprised that Clyde is going along with all this - just earlier this year, he cried over how scary some dumb horror movie was. And now, here he is, living in some kind of sick horror movie himself, holding it together. 

When Craig opens the staircase door, they’re blasted with a gust of stale air, the smell of decay enveloping them. Craig grits his teeth and quietly starts upwards, hyper aware of his surroundings and flinching at every little creak of the steps below his feet. 

One flickering light still hangs on at the top of the stairwell, completing the shitty horror movie vibe and immediately giving Craig a headache. It doesn’t even do much to keep the stairwell lit - there’s a skylight a few stories up that floods daylight around them.

They reach the landing just outside the first floor and the door is closed. Craig peeps through the barred screen and what little he can see makes his heart sink. Bodies strewn about carelessly, bags full of God knows what spilling everywhere. But no sign of anything else. Wordlessly, he gestures to Clyde that he’s going to open the door. Clyde clings closer.

Craig’s not sure if he’s used to the stench of death by now or if there actually isn’t anything to smell, but he’s glad he’s not noticing whatever all the body parts smell like. All the heads he sees (which, admittedly, isn’t very many) all have bullet or stab wounds in the forehead. They’re quiet for a moment, but it’s clear that they’re the only living things on this floor.

“Check the bags,” Craig says, gesturing to a pile of them. “Might be something useful in there.”

Craig explores further down the hallway, trying doors and peering in units that have been left open. A lot of the doors have been barred from the inside, which at first scares him a little, but then he remembers all the broken windows that they had seen from the ground level. Most of the windows on the first three or four floors were all shattered in and he can’t imagine anyone would still be behind the barred doors. 

One of the apartments left open doesn’t seem to be in bad shape. He checks on Clyde, who’s got a flashlight in one hand, the other elbow deep in a rolling suitcase, and creeps inside slowly. 

The unit seems virtually untouched, aside from the empty cupboards and a pile of garbage in the corner. For a building abandoned this long, Craig had been expecting to see something a little more… gory, at the very least. Maybe some blood on the wall, an arm or two, but there’s just nothing here. 

He’s still cautious as he enters the kitchen. The open cupboards don’t have anything in them, but there’s a cabinet near the back that he has to pry open with his crowbar. A gleaming set of knives sits inside. He wonders why the previous inhabitants left without them. He takes out the biggest one for Clyde, tucking the handle into his pants and making sure it’s not going to stab him as he moves.

He ventures out of the kitchen, ignoring the near-pristine looking living room, and heads for one of the bedrooms. He checks the closet first, finding nothing there, then roots around in the dresser and under the bed. His hand lands on something fabric and pulls it out.

It’s a reusable grocery bag, and he can barely believe his luck. Inside is a few jars of peanut butter, a bag of pasta, some canned meats and fish, and a few bottles of water. Sticking his hand back under the bed reveals another grocery bag with similar spoils. 

He has to fight the cheer that wells up inside him. He wonders briefly if he’s stumbled upon the survival supplies of someone coming back for them, but decides not to think about it as he goes to join Clyde in the hallway.

“All I found was this flashlight and some dirty underwear,” he tells Craig morosely. “What’s that?”

Craig pulls out the knife he found. “First, I got you this.” He holds up the two grocery bags with his other hand to show them off. “Next, I found the _motherload.”_

Clyde sifts through the bags with a look of disbelief on his face. “Dude.” He holds up a jar of peanut butter like it’s the holy grail. “Dude!”

“I know.” Craig can’t help his smile. “Empty one of those suitcases on wheels and we’ll start loading our shit in it so it’s easier to carry.”

Clyde does what he’s told and soon, they’re heading back up the stairwell, new knife and suitcase in tow. 

They don’t find anything on the next few floors, and Craig can tell Clyde is starting to get tired. He marks the spot they left off, just in case they decide to come back, by spreading a bunch of bloody sweatshirts he found in one of the apartments in the doorway. They’re both buzzing with excitement over their bag of food as they make their way back down, even through the dark room that terrified Clyde earlier.

But that wears off pretty quickly when Craig carelessly throws open the door to see their car, their only way out, surrounded by some _very_ hungry looking zombies. And try as he might, Craig just _can't_ get the door closed. One of them looks up at the sounds of Craig's struggle, lets out a haunting, gutteral moan, and starts pushing at the others to get to them.

It runs into the passenger side door, slamming it shut and alerting the five or so others to what the rogue zombie is doing. 

The passenger side door is the only thing keeping the car from blocking the wall. With it shut, and the door to the building not closing, Craig's heart stops as they keep coming towards them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU DIDN'T THINK I WOULD LEAVE YOU WITHOUT A CLIFFHANGER, DID YOU?
> 
> Find me over on [Tumblr!](https://wonder-tweeks.tumblr.com/)


	4. Chapter 4

Craig has to abandon trying to close the door, and instead, grabs Clyde (who is holding onto the suitcase for dear life but somehow still drops his knife) and races off back towards the stairwell. 

“Fuuuuuuuck,” he lets out, huffing and puffing up the stairs. “Fuck, I looked out the window before we went down, I didn’t see them!”

Clyde bumps up against him. He’s slowing down. Not a good sign. “Where do we go?”

“Second floor,” Craig answers, his chest tight. He can hear the creatures following him up the stairs. “There’s one that still has a door that opens.”

He has to use the rest of his strength to drag Clyde up the remaining stairs, and the door slams loudly behind them, but they reach the second floor and the right apartment before the zombies can catch up. They’re in the apartment and have barred the door when they can hear them outside.

Clyde turns to him, eyes wide, his knuckles going white on the suitcase. “What do we do?” he breathes, his voice high pitched and afraid. 

“We have to wait them out,” Craig answers quietly. “However long that takes. We can leave whenever we have an opening. Hopefully they go to a different floor or something, long enough to distract them so we can run downstairs and get in the car.”

Clyde’s face is pale and he’s sweating heavily, almost unable to catch his breath. He’s terrified. Craig is, too, but he has to try to keep it together, or he knows he’s going to absolutely lose it. 

“I don’t want to die here, man,” Clyde says in that quiet little voice. “I don’t want to die  _ anywhere.” _

“We’re not gonna die, dude, keep it together.” Craig tries to be comforting, but something about the way Clyde is freaking out is unnerving him. 

Clyde, instead of listening to Craig, slumps his body up against the wall and slides down, his face pale and eyes watering. It reminds Craig of growing up with him, how it barely took any amount of stress to make Clyde break down. People always picked on Tweek for being twitchy and anxious, but he never had anything on Clyde’s overemotional outbursts. Even now, he can almost picture Clyde rolling on the floor, clutching an injured leg, crying his eyes out.

Craig stays close to the door, keeping his ear out for the zombies wandering the halls. It sounds like they’ve gotten into the apartment next door, and one of them is clawing the wall loudly.

“They know we’re in here,” Clyde says in horror, his voice barely audible over the moaning and groaning outside. “They can’t get in with the door so they’re going to dig through the walls.”

Craig holds a hand up to stop Clyde from talking, but it doesn’t stop him from curling in on himself and whimpering quietly. Craig purses his lips but kneels down in front of his friend.

“Buddy, Clyde, man,” he says, reaching a hand out and putting it on Clyde’s arm. “Nothing is coming through the walls. I really need you to get it together. We just have to wait it out, but you’re going to wear yourself out before then by freaking out like this.”

There are tears running down Clyde’s cheeks now, and he has to hold back loud sniffles. It sets in that he’s  _ actually _ really horrified by this and Craig feels bad for being so blase about it. 

“Dude, you really think I’m gonna let you just die?” he asks, his voice now tinged with a little emotion, his best attempt at sounding comforting. Clyde cracks the shadow of a smile. “I’ll fuck up every zombie here before they even come near you, I promise you.”

Clyde sniffles again. Craig wonders how much of this is for dramatic effect, but just pats Clyde’s arm as he gets up to resume pacing back and forth near the door. He chances a glance out of the peephole (he’s never trusted those - he’s convinced you can see all the way in from the outside) and has to keep his quiet horror to himself.

He can’t count how many zombies are out there, because there are simply too many to count. And judging by the sounds next door, there’s even more of them in there.

But he can’t let Clyde know that.

Instead, he slowly backs away from the door, as casually as he can, and bends down once more to crack open the suitcase, digging around for the can of almonds he saw earlier like he has no care in the world.

And for now, that’s all he can do.

*~*

Tweek has to admit that he’s almost impressed at how brilliantly stupid Butters is.

They stayed in the apartment one more day before venturing out to an empty building. The stairwells empty, the other floors empty, and the streets around them empty. 

Until Butters  _ thinks _ he sees someone and hollers over to them, instantly awakening the dormant undead in the smashed up buildings around them. They seem to come from everywhere, even places the three of them had already passed, which turns Tweek’s stomach. He watches them for a second as they rise from strange places, moaning and groaning, all honed in on the sound of Butters’ voice. Tweek has to grab both Butters and Scott to get them to start moving in the opposite direction.

As they run, absolutely lost and having no idea where they’re going, Tweek can’t resist hurling insults at the other blonde.

“Butters, you  _ fucking moron,”  _ he yells, his breath catching. “What are we supposed to do now?”

They turn a sharp corner and are able to duck behind an overturned car, the three of them making themselves as small as possible and silently praying they weren’t followed. Tweek can hear the shambling figures behind them, but thankfully doesn’t hear them turn the same corner.

“Well, gee, Tweek, I didn’t know it was just a jacket,” Butters whispers bashfully, his face turning red. “It really looked like a person!”

“Even if it was a person, you don’t just fucking yell to them! What if they had a gun?! They would have killed us! Shot us all in one go, wouldn’t even think twice! Fuck, man! Sometimes the people are worse than the fucking zombies!”

His nails dig into his fists hard to try to keep them from grabbing his hair, and he’s sure it’s drawing blood. His heart is beating too fast and his ears are ringing too loud for him to notice if it hurts or not. 

Being stuck in the middle of the zombie apocalypse with Butters and Scott Malkinson is surely how he’s going to die. It must be. There’s no way he’ll be able to survive with these two tailing him the whole time. 

He decides he has to ditch them somewhere. There’s no other choice. Butters will eventually make another stupid mistake, thinking there’s someone to help them, and Scott will probably die of diabetes, or whatever. Tweek doesn’t know much about diabetes.  _ Surely _ it’ll kill him, though, at some point.

Tweek peeks around the side of the car and sees nothing. He can hear the zombies in the distance, so maybe if he can get up quietly enough, spin some kind of story for Butters and Scott so they don’t follow him, just sneak away…

But he can’t. Mostly due to the fact that Butters has a death grip on his arm as he’s huddled and shaking beside him, but also because he thinks of Kenny’s face if he ever found out that Tweek was with Butters and just left him.

Maybe he’ll just ditch Scott. 

“What do we do now?” Butters asks directly into Tweek’s ear, his voice terrified and his breath hot on Tweek’s neck. 

Tweek has to keep it together. “If we stay here, something will eventually find us. We have to keep going. And don’t fucking yell this time, dude. Seriously.”

Right now, with two people relying on him, Tweek is having a really hard time not freaking the fuck out. But he knows that won’t help anything. So he keeps it in. Freaks out on the inside, even though he just wants to scream and cry and rip out all of his hair. He wonders how Kenny and Bebe do it, with their natural leadership and quick thinking.

He remembers how often he’d just black out not even a month ago when the stress got too much. What happened to him? He’s not complaining, just confused. He supposes it might be bad timing if he passed out from the stress just as some zombies began to chase them. Especially since Craig isn’t here to save him…

His heart pangs with a sharp pain as he thinks of Craig. His chest feels tight. He  _ can’t _ think about Craig. He’ll save that for when they’re not running for their lives. 

He gets up slowly, hyper aware of their surroundings as the pain starts to subside as the blue hat he’s come to love fades from his mind. He holds out a hand to hoist up Butters, then Scott. Neither of them look like they’re in any state to keep going for a long time, so Tweek sighs. 

“We probably shouldn’t have left the apartment,” he grumbles, venturing out as quietly as he can to look around the corner. The zombie hoard has passed, and he doesn’t know where they’ve gone. He returns to Scott and Butters. “We need to find somewhere to lay low for a bit until we know we’re safe to continue.”

The trio wanders around the city carefully for the rest of the afternoon. Scott and Butters spend the entire time halfway up Tweek’s ass, and he’s ready to explode at them when they find an empty storefront they can hide in for a bit. 

It looks like it was once a craft shop. It’s tiny, has all its windows intact, and there’s no alarm set when Tweek tentatively pushes open the door, braced to run away from the sound. The scene inside is chaos, but it provides a lot of good hiding spots should they need them, under overturned shelves and massive piles of discarded fabric. Anything that was actually useful seems to have been cleared out for a while, but it’s better than nothing.

“We can stay here until we figure out what to do,” Tweek says, carefully closing the door and peering out the windowed door to make sure nothing followed them. He flips the lock and ducks behind one of the shelves to stay out of sight. “We can regroup in the morning. You guys look like you need some sleep.”

“But it’s still light out!” Butters pipes up. Tweek glares at him.

“We’re not fucking ten, Butters, don’t argue about bedtime.”

And with that, he pulls a long piece of hideous fabric around his body, curling up with it on the floor and draping it over his eyes. He’s suddenly feeling much more tired than he was before, and his body hurts. He knows sleeping on the floor is only going to make that worse, but he supposes it’s a fair trade off.

Butters and Scott shuffle around for a bit, background noise to Tweek. He feels Butters settle in beside him, squirming up as though he’s trying to cuddle. Tweek’s too tired to argue and just lets Butters do whatever makes him feel better.

“I really am sorry, Tweek,” he whispers. “For everything. This has been a real mess.”

Tweek opens one eye. Butters is a  _ lot _ closer than he was expecting. Their noses are practically touching.

“Make it up to me by not getting me killed,” he says quietly. “Or dying yourself.  _ Then _ I’ll forgive you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, as I'm writing, I have to stop and wonder if it's like *too* out of character for Tweek to be a zombie apocalypse leader, but do you ever like get so stressed out that your body literally forgets you're an anxious mess? Cause mine does sometimes. And I feel like that's what would happen here. Tweek DESERVES to be a wasteland badass, you know?
> 
> Last point: I've been toying with the idea of someone other than Kenny dying. Who would you least suspect? I know who it is if I go down that path, because I have a few different endings I can explore here, but I want to know what you think! We'll see who's right!
> 
> Find me over on [Tumblr!](https://wonder-tweeks.tumblr.com/)


	5. Chapter 5

“Fuck. I think we’re outta gas.”

Just as he says it, Token’s car sputters and dies almost instantly. He hits the steering wheel a few times, frustrated. They don’t have any in the trunk - it’s in Bebe’s car, but they lost Bebe, Wendy, Ike and Karen almost an hour ago trying to avoid a zombie hoard on the highway. Bebe had taken a hard turn up an exit ramp and sped off, while Token gunned it straight down the road under the overpass. Jimmy leans over in the front seat to peek at the gas gauge, as if he won’t believe it otherwise. 

“S-s-s-hit, fellas,” he says, looking back at the horrified Stan, Kyle and Kenny in the backseat. “What should we do? I don’t know where we are.”

He holds up his wrinkled and faded map they stole out of someone’s glove compartment for emphasis. 

They’ve been driving for longer than any of them can keep track of. Kyle thinks that the clock in the SUV is incorrect, and keeps pointing it out like it’s a new observation every time, but no one has a watch to prove it. All they know is that the sun is high in the sky and there’s too much open space around them with nowhere to go.

Not like they know where they  _ could _ go to begin with. Their little escapade down the highway took them off in a direction that Jimmy couldn’t keep track of, passing smaller and smaller landmarks as they went. None of them know the last time they even saw a building.

“Should we wait for Bebe to circle back to us?” Token asks. He looks nervous. He’s thinking what they’re all thinking: How long until the hoard finds them again? They only lost them because Token’s car went faster than they could run. It felt, to all of them, like it was only a matter of time before they caught up. 

“That could take hours,” Stan replies hoarsely. “We don’t know where she went, if she even does come back.”

The five are silent for a few long moments, not able to look at each other or out their windows. 

It’s Kenny who breaks the silence. “We’ll have to get out and walk. Find somewhere to lay low.”

It seems like it’s their only option now, but it doesn’t stop Kyle from scoffing loudly, crossing his arms and rolling his eyes next to Kenny. 

“Lay low where, Kenny?” he asks, condescending. “We’re on the highway in the middle of a fucking field, it’s flat for longer than we can walk. Getting out of this car would make us walking targets!”

“So you’d rather just stay out in the open in the middle of the road, waiting for something to find us? Look, at least if we’re on foot, we can run away if something comes our way. If they catch up to us, they’re gonna swarm the car. You can stay here, dude, but I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

“Wait!” Token cries, frantically locking the doors from the drivers side. “We can’t get separated! We  _ promised _ to stick together after Craig and Clyde left, remember? You can’t just leave!”

Kenny doesn’t try to open the door, despite knowing that there aren’t any child locks on and it only locked the door from the outside. He shakes his head. “You all know we can’t stay here.”

And they do know. Even Kyle, whose lips are pursed so hard they’re turning red. It’s obvious he’s looking for a way to argue, but doesn’t seem to be able to find one. He sighs, defeated, not saying anything.

“I think I have a plan.” Kenny uses his hands to gesture as he speaks. “We get out as quietly as we can, and push the car as far to the side of the road as we can. We’ll paint a message on it for Bebe-”

Token cuts him off here. “We’re not painting anything on my car! If I ever find my parents again, they’ll kill me!” His eyes are wide and he looks very upset at the thought. 

“Dude.” Stan eyeballs his friend apprehensively. “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but I  _ really _ don’t think you should be worried about what your parents will think if we paint a message on your car.”

Similar to Kyle, Token knows when to give up. He’s still frowning, but doesn’t continue. Kenny waits a beat before he begins to speak again.

“We’ll tell Bebe and them that we were here and that we left. If we go across the field this way-” he points out the passenger side window, “you can see a treeline, kinda off in the distance. At least there we can find some cover.”

“Shouldn’t we be trying to find a t-t-t-t-own?” Jimmy asks. “We don’t really have that many supplies left, how long can we last out in the wil-w-wilder… great outdoors?”

“That’s where all the zombies are, Jim,” Kenny answers. “We’re less likely to run into anything in the woods, dude. We’ll make it work, I promise.”

They’re all a bit uneasy, but no one else knows what to do, so that’s the plan they agree on.

*~*

It’s a shorter walk than they expected to get to the tree line, the rocky grass patches over hard ground giving way to a modest forest, covered with thick coniferous trees and plants, the earth moist beneath their feet. 

Kenny is able to set up the one tent they had in the trunk, and since they don’t have anything else to go inside the tent, they all decide to squeeze in together to keep warm and sheltered. It’s a tight fit with their two backpacks of supplies stuffed in the corner, and Jimmy’s crutches used to prop up one side of the tent that’s sagging, but none of them are concerned about that right now. 

As the sun sets outside, it begins to set in how potentially dangerous this situation is. At least under the cover of abandoned houses or cars, they had a way to hide or escape. But now, in a tent in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere, no matter how sheltered, they all feel exposed. 

Afraid.

“We’ll get up with the sun tomorrow,” Kenny says quietly. He’s got one arm slung around Kyle and the other around Stan, his legs resting in Token’s lap. “Find out where we are, get our bearings. See if we can find anyone else, or at least try to replenish our supplies.”

“I wish my dad hadn’t sold his farm,” Stan says, his voice hoarse and wistful. “We all could have gone there. He reinforced the barn at one point.”

Kyle chuckles, the first time he’s done so in a long time. “Remember how paranoid he was about the FDA?”

“Which makes no sense, because weed wasn’t made illegal or anything.”

“Imagine it,” Kenny says. “Us getting absolutely blitzed on all that kush. Then fucking up any zombie within ten miles.”

“Kenny, you used to get so high that you’d forget to put pants on,” Token reminds him, but he’s smiling too. “And remember when you thought Mackey was your dad? You couldn’t fuck up a blade of grass if you were that high.”

Kenny chuckles. “Okay, I wouldn’t get  _ that _ high.”

As it gets darker, the spend the night reminiscing about the stupid things they did as kids. They talk until they hear crickets around them and their eyelids get heavy. Token is the first one to fall asleep, curled up in on himself in a ball. Then Jimmy, then Kyle. 

Kenny withdraws his arm from Stan and turns to look at him seriously.

“I’m gonna level with you dude,” he says quietly, just above a whisper. “We’re gonna have to find something soon, or we’re fucked.”

“I know,” Stan replies somberly. “Even if we find some fresh water, we might be able to fish or something. We still have matches. We just have to… get lucky, I guess.”

“Not lucky. We have to be careful.” Kenny’s face is more serious than Stan’s ever seen it. “Really careful. And, dude, I know you wanna protect Kyle, but you  _ have _ to watch out for yourself.”

Stan doesn’t reply, but Kenny knows he’s taking his words to heart.

“We don’t have much in the way of weapons. So we’re going to have to rely on being quiet, or being able to detach one of Jimmy’s crutches fast enough to bash a skull or two in if we really have to. And we  _ need _ to find somewhere with better shelter. We can’t stay in this tent forever.”

“Maybe we can find a town,” Stan says hopefully. Kenny nods.

“No idea where the fuck we are, but the state is full of them.” He looks up, and in the darkness, Stan can see he’s closed his eyes. “We’ll find something eventually. Hopefully with electricity. Fuck, I’d love to see a lightbulb again.”

“And take a hot shower,” Stan adds. He sniffs the air. “You need one, dude.”

“Fuck you!  _ You _ need one!”

There’s another long pause. Stan sighs softly.

“I’m scared, man.”

“Me too.”

*~*

None of them get much sleep. It takes Stan a long time to drift off, and once he does, every little sound wakes him up, which in turn, wakes Jimmy up. When the sun begins to rise, they’re all already awake, cranky, tired, hungry, and sore. 

But they’re alive, as Jimmy keeps reminding them as he trails along behind them through the forest.

Since they don’t know where they are, it takes a while to properly get their bearings. Kenny insists on zigzagging around to throw anything that might be following them off their scent, but Kyle puts a stop to it once they realize they’ve just walked in a big circle. 

So, they resign to walking in a straight line, reasoning that eventually there’ll be a break in the trees and they’ll be able to reorient themselves properly.

But it’s been hours, if the light that gets through the trees is any indication, and there’s no sign of the forest letting up. 

Desperate, they keep going.

Kyle is trying not to look over at Jimmy. He hasn’t been complaining, but Kyle knows that his arms are raw from having his crutches on this whole time. He’s surprised Jimmy has been able to get this far. Kenny’s offered to carry him several times, but Jimmy is adamant that he walk.

They’re almost ready to give up. Almost. And then the trees begin to thin out, and they can see ahead of them.

“Holy shit,” Stan says, squinting. “It’s a house. Fuck, it’s like, five houses!”

They let out a few cheers before remembering where they are, and fall back into silence, albeit with a cheerful buzz reverberating between them, and their steps faster and lighter than before.

The forest gives way onto what appears to be a tiny village, or perhaps a large farm with several properties. Fields stretch out ahead of them, though there doesn’t seem to be anything growing there. Venturing further proves that it’s a village, complete with a ranch style building proclaiming to be a Saloon. In total, there’s about twenty buildings, mostly wooden houses to match the Saloon, and several cars parked in front of the homes.

Kenny, who’s been leading them into the village, throws a hand out to stop anyone from getting ahead of him, looking back with his other hand held up to his mouth as if to shush them. “Careful,” he says, his eyes roving around. “There could be people here who don’t want to see us.”

“What do we do if there are?” Kyle asks. 

“Make it obvious we’re not a threat,” Stan says, as on edge as Kenny. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Jimmy ambles up. “I’m not a threat, I’ll go f-firs-fir… I’ll go on ahead.”

But it becomes obvious that there’s no one here. It’s a bit disappointing, but they’re also relieved that there aren’t any zombies.

They cautiously approach the houses one by one, not separating from each other. Most of them are simple one level homes with modest furnishings, but there are two with two levels. Kenny is the only one who can muster up the courage to go upstairs, but both times he does, he comes back down empty handed.

They find no one.

“Let’s check the Saloon,” Stan suggests. “There might be food there.”

Food is clearly the magic word, and they all pile over to the Saloon, the wooden deck groaning under their combined weight. There’s a layer of dust that none of them expect to see on the wood; their shoes leave prints. It makes them all uneasy.

“How long has it been since anyone’s been here?” Token asks, almost absent mindedly, as Kenny easily pushes the door open and peeks inside.

The inside is a very outdated style bar, with Western motifs all around. The windows are dingy and covered mostly by moth eaten curtains, the tables are dirty but otherwise uncluttered, and the wall behind the bar area shelves dusty collections of bottles, clearly untouched for a long time.

Though there aren’t any signs of anyone hiding there, they’re cautious as they poke around. Jimmy quietly stifles a cough from how dusty the interior is, while Kyle openly hacks as he gets a faceful from opening a drawer.

“Jesus Christ, dude,” he says, fanning the dust away from his mouth. “This must be a ghost town or something. I wonder if people left before this all started.”

“Must have,” Stan agrees, looming behind Kyle and looking over his shoulder while he rummages through the drawer. “Has anyone found anything? Looks like this is just a junk drawer. Some matches, though.”

Kenny emerges from a hall behind the bar. “There’s a bit of food in the kitchen, not sure how good it is, but it’ll have to do.”

Luckily, the food stored in the kitchen is well-preserved and they are able to gobble down a modest meal of beef jerky and a poorly heated can of spaghetti each. Further investigation reveals more canned and preserved foods that Token neatly stores away for another time. 

“We could stay here,” Kenny says, grinning, idly lighting a match and playing with it. “For a while, at least, until we figure our shit out.”

Obviously while the unknown town is not ideal, the five of them finally feel relaxed, hopeful and full for the first time in a long time.

*~*

They spend the night in the Saloon, finding a quiet back room with two couches and an armchair. Jimmy and Kyle take a couch each, Stan nestles up in the armchair, while Kenny and Token spread out sleeping bags on the floor to take turns keeping watch, although it feels a little pointless in such a long deserted town. Kenny instead spends the night cleaning up, covering up that anyone had ever been here in case anyone else stumbles upon the town the same way they had.

It becomes his routine. Night after night he does this. Sometimes he waits for the early morning, and gets up with the sun.

He’s outside sweeping the deck one such morning, a few weeks after they arrive, when he hears the noises. 

Having been used to picking up every little sound around him for months, he can’t ignore it. He puts the broom down and listens.

_ Thump. Thump. Thump. _

It’s unnerving. He listens further to find the direction it’s coming from, and immediately his stomach sinks and his chest gets tight in fear.

It’s coming from one of the barns near the edge of town. 

They had avoided the barns and any farm equipment when they arrived, due to a gut feeling Jimmy had, and now Kenny understands it. 

There’s something in the barn.

He heads over, stopping far enough away from it that he would be unnoticed, but close enough to see it clearly.

It’s not a particularly big barn, and curiously, there aren’t any windows on the side he’s facing and the door is chained shut from the outside. Whatever is in there is hitting one of the walls, not the door, so he at least takes comfort in the fact that it’s not going to get out.

Probably.

He tries to reason with himself, thinking that it might be a piece of equipment or something that’s come loose and is hitting the wall. He doesn’t  _ know _ that there’s something bad in there. But he can’t help but feel that it is.

He returns to the Saloon, feeling sick to his stomach. He enters the kitchen to his friends eating breakfast. Stan found a huge amount of powdered egg, enough to last them years, and though they smell horrendous, Jimmy and Token are scarfing them down almost as fast as Kyle is handing over their plates.

Stan’s the first to notice Kenny coming in. He frowns.

“You look like shit, dude. What’s up?”

Kenny hesitates. He doesn’t want to alarm them. But he doesn’t want to put them in danger, or keep them in the dark, either. “We have a problem.”

“Wha-w-w-what’s wrong?” Jimmy asks. He looks concerned. 

“Remember when we got here, and you said ‘don’t look in the barn’?” Kenny asks. “And no one could understand why? Well… there’s something in the barn. I didn’t go in or anything, but something is thumping around in there.”

They all fall silent, eyes wide and afraid. 

“This is like the fucking Walking Dead, dude,” Kyle says quietly. “Remember when they found the farm with the old guy and the two daughters? How they were keeping the zombies in the barn, and one of them was the old lady’s daughter and she let them out? Holy fuck, dude.”

“I don’t know for sure what’s in there,” Kenny says quickly. “And we have no reason to go open the doors. They’re chained shut. It’s just… really fucking creepy, you know?”

“Well, I think we need to find out for sure what’s in there,” Token says. When everyone turns to look at him in disbelief, he stands strong. “We can better protect ourselves if we know what we’re up against. And if it’s nothing, or like an animal or something, we can all sleep more soundly knowing it’s nothing.”

“And are  _ you _ going to go open the door to find out?” Kyle asks, his tone petulant. “I’m sure as shit not gonna do it.”

Kenny frowns. He understands Kyle’s fear, but Token is right. “No, if one of us goes, we all go. Safety in numbers. It’ll be easier for us all to see it, too, and fight it if it comes down to it.”

Kyle clearly doesn’t like the plan, but he’s outnumbered. Jimmy is quick to agree with Token and Kenny, and though Stan hesitates, he eventually convinces Kyle that they need to check out the barn. 

They spend the morning planning their attack. They find bolt cutters in a shed that they can use to cut the chain, and various things laying around become their weapons. Kenny, feeling very Craig like, lifts up a crowbar and tries not to think about where his raven haired friend might be right now. Token wields two huge butchers knives, sharpened on whatever he can find to do so along the way. Stan found a massive shotgun, too big for him as it’s slung over his shoulder. Kyle and Jimmy split spray cans of industrial strength weed killer, which won’t do much to kill the zombies, but will at least slow them down.

As they approach the barn and fan out, Kenny can’t help but snicker.

“Look at us,” he comments, trying to keep it light. “A rag tag bunch of zombie hunters. Who’d have thought?”

The others fail to see the humour in it, unfortunately.

Token takes a deep breath. “We sure we want to do this?”

“It was your idea, asshole,” Kyle hisses, practically cowering behind Stan, knuckles white on his bottle. “Let’s just get this over with.”

They all look at each other, uneasy, but eventually, Kenny picks up the bolt cutters, setting his crowbar down, and gingerly, as quietly as possible, positions them over the chain. It barely makes a noise as he cuts, but the noise it makes as the chain falls to the ground all at once certainly makes up for it.

Throwing the cutters aside, Kenny hastily picks up his crowbar again, readying it for anything that might come out at them. 

But nothing comes.

He exchanges a look with Token, both of them apprehensive and uneasy, and at the same time, they both reach a hand out to push the doors inwards. They creak loudly with age and disuse. Kenny can feel his friends around him suck in nervous breaths.

Almost immediately, they’re ambushed.

The first one must have been right near the doors when they were opened. Kenny sees its grotesque face, skin falling off, hair missing, rotten and decayed, coming right at him.

There are at least five zombies running at them before any of them have a chance to register what’s happening. Kenny and Token, closest to the doors, throw themselves back, yelling incoherently as Kyle and Jimmy immediately start spraying weed killer in all directions. 

“Fuck, dude!” Stan yells, dropping one side of his shotgun to clap a hand to one of his eyes. “You got me right in the fucking face!”

“Sorry!” Kyle hollers back, but he doesn’t sound sorry, just scared as he keeps on spraying. 

Kenny looks over at Jimmy, who’s abandoned his bottle and is now just swinging one of his crutches around desperately, in an attempt to keep one of the zombies away from him. It’s surprisingly effective; the zombie can’t even get close to him as metal flashes in front of its face.

He’s not sure what happens next. He almost feels like his body is taking over. He knows what’s going to come of this, and he knows that whatever it is, he’ll wake up in the Saloon somewhere, with no one around him remembering why.

It doesn’t even faze him anymore. 

Stan can’t seem to get a hold of his gun and Token’s dropped both of his knives. He’s resorted to climbing up the awning of the closest house and scrambling up onto the roof. Kenny’s distracted by a zombie getting in his face, which he whacks away as hard as he can with his crowbar. Next time he looks at Token, Jimmy is up there too, one of his crutches laying abandoned on the ground. 

Two zombies descend on Stan as wobbly arms try to get the shotgun into place. It’s not looking good. They get too close for comfort, and Kenny’s stomach drops.

“Get out of the way, dude!” Kenny screams, partially to make Stan realize the seriousness of what he’s seeing, and partially to try to distract the creatures. It does work, sort of. But instead of coming to Kenny, they instead join up with another and gang up on Kyle, who’s stupidly backed himself into a corner of one of the houses. His spray bottle is nowhere to be seen. He’s completely defenseless. 

Kenny can vaguely hear Stan cry Kyle’s name as he abandons the gun and tries to run over to his best friend, but Kenny reacts with less than a second of thought and swoops in on Stan, who is closer to him than Kyl is, and dragging him away.

“They’re gonna get him, dude!” Stan wails, clawing at Kenny’s arm. “You can’t let them!” 

He’s desperate. Fear radiates off of him, Kenny can practically feel it. He knows Stan will do something stupid given the chance, but Kenny won’t allow it. Given the choice between one of them or both of them, he can’t risk it being both of them.

“I can’t let them get you!” 

He’s pulled Stan far enough away and is now focusing on holding him back so he doesn’t try to rush the trio who’ve now gotten close enough to Kyle to make Kenny really and truly afraid. It feels like reality is moving in slow motion as he watches Kyle tremble and cower under the rotting hands of what used to be humans.

He can’t watch.

He’s got a pit in his stomach that hurts, much more than he thought it could hurt. His chest is tight. He can barely breathe. Dying, for him, is nothing like this. The emotional response scares him. He’s gotten so used to the fact that he always comes back that he’d never really considered that if those things get Kyle, he  _ can’t _ come back.

If anything happens to Kyle, he’s not going to wake up in the Saloon like Kenny. 

Should he do something? He doesn’t know what he can do. He’s not sure he would get there in time to stop them from doing anything, much less from outright killing one of his best friends. 

But he can’t even begin to think about trying to get over there when a gunshot rings out, and the sound of a loudly revving engine overwhelms him. The creatures that were ambushing Kyle have been sufficiently distracted, properly this time. They stop in their tracks and recalibrate their destination to the source of the sound.

Kenny can’t see Kyle. He’s folded in on himself and the legs of the groaning creatures block Kenny’s view.

He barely realizes that Stan’s broken from his grip and is running over to Kyle. Kenny lets him. He watches as the zombies shamble over to a Jeep, shrouded in the dusty residue of the gravel it had just driven over. 

Where the fuck had that come from?

Stan lets out a choked cry from somewhere to Kenny’s left as the shell-shocked redhead is scooped into his arms, Stan sobbing and blubbering loudly. But Kenny pays them no mind.

He’s more interested in the blonde that’s revealed by the settling of the dust, hanging out the side of the Jeep, looking less and less like the person Kenny once knew him as, and more like a  _ complete fucking badass. _

More importantly, he’s more interested in the other blonde who’s launched himself out from behind the first one and is running right at Kenny, eyes squinting from the dust and the dirt and laughing joyfully with his arms outstretched.

“Kenny!” he’s crying, laughing as though he can’t believe his eyes. And, truthfully, neither can Kenny. He hasn’t seen this man in so long, and the last time he did, he was sure he never would again.

He can’t fight his own smile, stretching across his face. He smiles so big that his cheeks hurt. His eyes fill with tears, flabbergasted at the timing of it all.

“Leo!”

The sunshine of Kenny’s life finds his way into his arms once more. Gripping him in an embrace so tight, picking him up and spinning him a few times, not sure which body is which after a moment.

And he can’t help it. Once Butters,  _ his _ Butters, is safely on the ground on his own two feet, Kenny leans down and immediately catches his lips in their first kiss in what feels like a lifetime. Butters, as he always does, melts into it and sighs that sweet sigh that makes Kenny’s heart flutter.

“Pay up, Malkinson,” says one of Kenny’s other favourite voices. Something is slapped into his palm to signify what appears to be a bet. “I told you this would happen.”

“Fuck off, Tweek,” Scott lisps moodily. Kenny has to wonder what he had to pay Tweek, but doesn’t spend much time on the thought.

Because he has Butters.

He’s lost in the soft lips of his sunshine. Everyone’s moving around them, but he doesn’t care.

Until Tweek taps him on the shoulder.

When Kenny meets the green eyes of his second favourite blonde, his excitement at seeing Butters evaporates. Tweek is hardly the person Kenny once knew him as. His cheeks are hollow, his hair is grown out and more unruly than usual, and his shirt is ripped, revealing a leaner body than usual. It sets Kenny on edge as he realizes that Butters and, indeed, Scott, are sporting similar hallowed, weathered looks. 

“Bad time, dude,” Tweek says in a low voice, jerking his thumb over to Stan and Kyle.

If possible, Kenny’s stomach wrenches even more, and immediately, he’s pulled over to his two best friends. 

Stan’s holding Kyle, his tears long since dried, eyes wide and afraid, rocking the redhead back and forth, his grip tighter than it should be.

Kenny looks to Tweek, desperate to know what happened. Tweek just holds up his arm, then tips his head to Kyle.

Underneath the death grip Stan has on Kyle, Kenny can see Kyle’s sleeve has been ripped apart, torn to shreds, bloody and gory.

A scratch. A long, jagged scratch, spanning his entire forearm and dripping blood everywhere.

Things certainly don’t look good, he thinks. Not good at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's the classic trope of help suddenly arriving in the nick of time, but somehow, *not soon enough*
> 
> Also Bunny!!!! Who saw my little hints here and there across Linger? I wanted to be subtle, but I think I may have been too subtle at times. 
> 
> Pls don't hate me :(
> 
> Find me over on [Tumblr!](https://wonder-tweeks.tumblr.com/)


	6. Chapter 6

Tweek can’t be in the same room as Kyle as he howls out in pain, the bleeding neverending.

And it’s not just Kyle who’s the problem. It’s mostly because of Stan.

Stan’s taken on a weird role with Kyle now, part mother hen, part guard dog, part overly emotional wreck to rival even a Clyde-level meltdown. He hasn’t left Kyle’s side and being in the same room as the two of them is suffocating. 

So Tweek leaves them. They’re holed up in the office of the Saloon, Kyle bleeding all over the tacky 70’s carpet, and Tweek is outside, desperately trying to think of something else.

He watches a bird fly overhead. It’s too high up and close to the sun to see what it is. Is it a hawk? An eagle? A vulture? Do they even  _ have _ vultures in Colorado? He wishes he could pull out his phone and Google it as he tries to remember. He’s sure it’s a vulture, drawn in by the scent of blood and the pained screams of Kyle as he dies in the Saloon. 

Token suggested amputating Kyle’s arm, but that just made Kyle scream louder. How Kyle could even understand what Token was saying through his delirium, Tweek didn’t know, but he was very against the idea. And since Kyle didn’t want it, Stan wouldn’t let anyone near.

The bird flies closer. Oh, Tweek realizes. It’s just a very overweight pigeon. Harmless. He’s surprised it can even fly, considering how big it is.

He kicks a rock at his foot, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He wonders if Kyle will bleed out and die and not come back, or if the scratches are like in the movies, somehow carrying the infection. He wonders if Kyle will reanimate. 

He hopes not.

Before he can stop it, he’s assaulted by an onslaught of memories of Heidi the night at Stark’s Pond. How her skin was falling off. How her hair was ripped out in patches. How her face was covered in dried blood. The blood of her parents.

His chest starts to feel tight. He grunts, loudy, grasping at his hair with sharp nails digging into his scalp, as though the matted strands could pull out the memories. He tries so hard to keep out the memory of her voice, but it barges into his thoughts anyway.

_ I just wanted to see Stark’s Pond one last time… _

_ The future doesn’t hold anything good, you need to realize that… _

_ ….this is a lot to ask… I need you to kill me… _

“Tweek?”

Tweek nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of Stan’s voice. He’d been so deep in the memories that he lost track of where he was going. He’s somehow wandered back to the Saloon, standing out back near an old air conditioning unit. His head hurts and when he removes his hands, they’re both full of chunks of blonde hair. He’s startled by that too, and opens his hands to let them float to the ground gently. 

“Didn’t expect to see you out here,” he comments to Stan, shoving his hands back into his pockets to keep them out of his hair. “How… how is he?”

Stan sighs. “Not good. I just… I think it’s time.”

“Oh.”

They’re silent for a moment. Tweek leans against the building, trying to find the pigeon again. Stan clears his throat, uncomfortable.

“He wants to see you.”

Tweek looks over in mild surprise. “Kyle does?”

“Yeah.” Stan nods. “He’s having some sort of come to Jesus moment, I think. He seems to have gone numb or something, he stopped talking about the pain a while ago. Keeps… keeps talking about how I shouldn’t be sad. Go on, live life, all that shit.”

Tweek shifts his weight from one foot to the other, considering this. He looks up at Stan, surprised to see such a pained look on his face. He frowns. “Are you okay?”

Stan doesn’t answer right away. One of his lips curls in under the other. 

“How do you do it?” he asks eventually, his voice strained and sounding older than his years. “How do you just… go on? Without him?”

“Without who?”

“Craig.”

As soon as Stan says the name, Tweek’s resolve crumbles. He’s been trying  _ so _ hard not to think about Craig the past few weeks, or however long it’s been since they last saw each other. Because every time he does, he loses it. Back in the city, when it was just him, Butters and Scott, he almost got bitten when a zombie chasing him kind of looked like Craig. He couldn’t bring himself to hurt the thing, and if it wasn’t for Scott swooping in at the last minute with a jagged piece of glass to the rotting eye, he would have been zombie lunch.

God, he misses Craig  _ so _ much. He spent a lot of time fretting over whether he was still alive or not, but he just knows that he is. He doesn’t know how, and he knows that if he finds out that Craig got eaten it’s going to be a hell of a time, but he has to tell himself that Craig is okay.

But Tweek is stronger than this. He brings himself back without a meltdown and stares Stan right in the face.

“Just don’t think about it.”

His tone comes out more harsh than he had intended, more flat and probably sounding rude, but he doesn’t care. Stan’s the one that asked. He’s just being honest, even if it kind of makes him sound like an asshole.

“How do you do that?” The follow up gives Tweek pause.

“I just… think of other things,” he answers after a quick reflection. “It’s hard in the beginning, when you feel safe. But… you just have to think of other things.”

He looks over at Stan again. The man’s face has drained of all colour. Tweek frowns.

“You know,” he continues. “Like your girlfriend.”

This is clearly not the right thing to say, and Stan suddenly hits the vinyl siding behind them violently. Tweek straightens up, pushing himself off the wall and assuming a defensive stance just in case Stan tries anything. 

Tweek keeps going. “Kenny says you haven’t even mentioned her all this time you’ve been here playing house with Kyle. She could be anywhere, dude. And yet here you are, just-”

“Shut up!” Stan yells. His hands ball into fists at his side. “You don’t know anything!”

“I know that your little boyfriend is inside, while Wendy is out in the middle of nowhere. Do you even care about her? She could be dead for all you know.”

Stan slams a fist into the vinyl again. “Fuck off, Tweek!”

Tweek backs off. He’s made his point. He wasn’t exactly aiming to get this reaction from Stan, but perhaps it’s better than he has. Stan’s feeling what he needs to feel to take his mind off the redhead bleeding out inside.

“This is how you do it, dude,” he says quietly. “That anger? A distraction. Wendy? A distraction. That’s what you need.”

But instead of looking relieved, Stan just looks broken. Tweek feels regret. 

“I love him, dude.” Stan’s eyes start to water, his voice begins to crack. “I love him. What am I supposed to do without him?”

Now really and truly feeling the shame of regret, Tweek reaches out, pats Stan on the shoulder. 

“The world goes on, Stan,” he answers. “We might not like it, but the world goes on.”

*~*

Tweek doesn’t have long to reflect on his conversation with Stan before he heads into the back room of the Saloon to see Kyle. It’s a gory sight, and the queasiness he feels at the sight of all the blood is quickly replaced by shock and sorrow as he sees Kyle, crumpled up into himself on the couch. Despite the bandage wrapped around his arm, it’s completely soaked through, and is dripping onto the floor. He kneels down on the floor beside Kyle’s head.

His face is ghostly white, his eyes droopy and his mouth half open. Tweek puts a hand on his leg, one of the only spots not completely covered in blood.

“You look like shit,” he tells Kyle, not sure how else to open. Kyle laughs, a thick, gurgling noise that quickly turns into a cough. Blood spatters out from his lips. Clearly, the infection is spreading, confirming Tweek’s question about whether or not Kyle would turn.

“Feel like shit,” he answers. His voice is wispy, barely there. Tweek’s heart sinks into his toes when he hears it. “Can’t really feel it anymore, though.”

“That’s probably the blood loss,” Tweek says unsteadily. He’s used to seeing blood and gore now, he doesn’t care about that. He’s starting to feel numb himself at this whole situation. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Kyle chuckles once more, with a similar result to the first time. Tweek cringes. “Yeah, you can listen.”

Tweek cocks his head to the side, and Kyle draws in a great, shuddering breath to prepare himself to speak.

“Look, Tweek, I’m really sorry. For everything. I know I already said sorry back at camp, but then we lost you so soon after… and I didn’t even want to help Craig look for you. And I should have. And I’m sorry about the whole Heidi thing. I realize now that you just did what you had to. I don’t think I would have done anything differently in that situation. And I just… you’ve been so brave, Tweek. Don’t make any fucking jokes about me becoming my mother, but I’m  _ really _ proud of you, dude. You kick ass.”

Kyle’s words hit Tweek like a punch in the stomach. He doesn’t know what to say. Kyle takes the hint to continue.

“And… I’m really,  _ really _ sorry for what I’m about to ask you…”

His tone is familiar. Tweek stands up suddenly. He knows what’s on Kyle’s mind. He can’t let him get the words out. He  _ can’t _ go through this again with another person he loves and cherishes.

“Dude, no.”

Kyle’s bloodshot eyes are pleading. “Tweek,  _ please…” _

“I can’t, Kyle!” Tweek nearly shouts. “I can’t do this again! It hurt enough with Heidi. It would hurt even more with you.”

“This isn’t some fucked up honour thing, man, you’re the only one with a gun right now…”

Tears prick at blue eyes, threatening to spill over. 

But instead of being sad, Kyle almost looks serene. The sight stops Tweek’s tears. The dreamy little half smile on his friend's face reminds him of before everything went to hell.

“Remember that wack job professor we had in first year statistics?” Kyle asks. “Remember when she climbed on the desk and started clapping? Did we ever figure out why she did that?”

Tweek remembers it well. Their professor was a middle aged woman with grey hair who gave off serious crazy cat lady vibes. It was a week before their final exam, and without warning or explanation, she literally jumped onto her desk, started clapping her hands above her head, and said nothing. It was a favourite memory between Kyle and Tweek, something they could laugh about while Kenny, Stan and Wendy had no idea what they were laughing about.

Tweek chuckles. “Probably meth, dude. She was nuts. I bet she was buying from that kid who did the class five times, remember him? He had like, three teeth, tops. But always had  _ so _ much money. There’s no way he wasn’t selling it.”

They both laugh. For how mundane and boring it could be at times, their university experience was something Tweek never wanted to forget. Especially seeing Kyle now. He shakes his head.

“I thought things would be better,” he says mournfully. “I.. I dunno what we hoped to accomplish, but I just thought that with all our running that things would have turned out better for us.”

Kyle coughs up a little blood. His face is whiter than a sheet now, and he can barely keep his eyes open. “I did too. I thought… I thought we’d find people. Maybe they would know what to do. Cause we sure don’t.”

Tweek has to laugh at that. It’s true; none of them know what comes next. They keep running, but always have to pack up and go at the drop of a hat. It’s no way to live. And really, he can’t blame Kyle for wanting to get out. None of them know how to save him, how to make things better. 

But he doesn’t want to be the one.

“I can’t do it, man. I’ll give my gun to someone else. Anyone can do it. Kenny is a better shot than me.”

Kyle shakes his head. “Please. Please, Tweek. Just… I’m in so much pain that I can’t feel anything anymore.”

“I’m not the fucking executioner of the group, dude!” Tweek stands up, heads to the door. “I’m going to get Kenny.”

And before Kyle can protest, Tweek is on the other side of the door with it closed behind him. He sighs. 

Everyone is sitting outside the office, looking at him expectantly. 

“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” Token asks. “He’s not screaming anymore, so I’m going to take that as a small victory. What can we do to help?”

Tweek takes a split second to consider lying, but realizes it would be unfair to Kyle. “He wants someone to kill him. He’s… guys, he’s not doing well. Most of his blood is on the couch. None of us are doctors. But I… I can’t do it.”

There’s a brief moment of panic among his friends before Stan, face blank, pale as snow, approaches the door.

“I can do it,” he says in a solemn voice. “I knew he was going to ask you. I told him you wouldn’t do it. He says he doesn’t want me to do it, but… well, he asked.”

Tweek silently hands over his gun to Stan, who enters the room without another word. It’s only seconds before Tweek realizes that it’s too suffocating being in the same room as everyone else, so he leaves.

He walks around aimlessly for a while, his thoughts so far outside his own head that he doesn’t know if or when the gun went off. He’s been staring at the same cloud for almost an hour, he’s sure, when Stan finds him once again.

This time, Tweek can feel his presence and isn’t startled by it. He feels numb. Like he’s on the outside of his own life looking in, like he isn’t in his own body.

Stan doesn’t speak for a long time, and they just stand together, staring at the clouds. When he does speak, his voice cracks.

“That was a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

Without thinking about it, Tweek puts his arm around Stan’s shoulder. It’s uncomfortable, because Stan is tall, almost as tall as Craig, but he keeps it there anyway. If nothing else, he knows Stan needs that comfort. 

“But it’s like you said,” he continues. “The world goes on.”

“The world goes on,” Tweek repeats. “But we don’t have to forget.”

Stan rests his cheek on Tweek’s head. It’s clear that he definitely needs human contact. Tweek realizes that he smells like blood, but ignores the churn in his stomach at the coppery smell. 

“We won’t,” Stan answers. “I’ll make sure of it. We’ll get through this for him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, this is sad.
> 
> I've realized that I've let them off to easily so far, and also I've realized that like, they have no plan. So they needed one, or at least the motivation to make one. Voila.
> 
> Find me over on [Tumblr!](https://wonder-tweeks.tumblr.com/)


End file.
